Chasing the Dragon around the Kitchen

I was better at chasing it on the tin foil than B was. We both kept swapping between lighting and chasing, as my fingers burned holding it trying to angle it downwards.

I said fuck this, not high enough! Like a toddler who hasn't gotten the right flavor of lollypop. 

I added water to the big spoon my grandparents once used to serve up mashed potatoes--now a charred up heroin spoon. I held the flame away from it, watching it bubble but not boil. Using the syringes, the sliptip needle pulled off, I sucked up the remnants. I pulled back the plunger and watched the shit colored water fill the barrel.

Ducking into the bathroom, I got down on my knees and slipped the it into my asshole. It didn't hurt, it didn't burn like the coke had 3 years ago. I pushed down until there was nothing left.

Coming out of there, I felt R and Bs eyes watching me as I laid down on the couch. Now L was there too, getting his 1/2 gram I had picked up for him.

I felt fucked up. I felt high like I had done a ton of morphine and was now melting out of existence. My artheiric pain melted away leaving me content. I curled up on the couch so B could sit down.

He and L had water lined it--cooking it up to shoot up their noses. It made me gag after trying it, that cat piss taste at the back of my throat.

I probably plugged 1/5th of a gram--not embarrassed at the stigma of shoving a syringe up my ass, better than in my arm.

Every time my eyes would close I'd here "Lucy!" As I nodded off. Only to open them and see the 3 of them in front of the kitchen staring at me--scared I had ODd.

R was so depressed, hopeless watching me as I fell into a deep sleep. The oxymorphone and heroin pushing my eyes closed.

His brother got out of detox from h on Friday. I was the reminder that R could never escape h, and the pull it had on the people around him. I was his wife which was becoming a casualty of the opioid epidemic across the country. I was becoming another statistic.

I'm scared I'll come up positive for it in 2 days for my drug test although it'll be 3 days since I did it by then. Sunday morning was the last part I plugged and then I could be tested on Wednesday. I feel like I will be.

But what happens happens, and I'll have to live with the consequences. I am a fuck up, what can I say!?

Love you,

Lucy

Black Tar Dreams

Waiting outside the Twin Liquors right now, the car is hot and close, but I won't open the window. Excitement in the pit of my stomach mixes with a tinge of guilt and shame.

R is off getting a bottle of liquor and meeting up with Lee. That's all it takes to get a 19 year old to cop dope for you.

The patter of rain drops starts to mix in with the cars driving through the shopping center--law abiding citizens with no idea about the shadowy dealings in the parking lot.

Waiting for the Men

All the traveling kids are sitting in our living with their dogs at their feet right now. 4 of them spent the night plus Kilo and Cannabis (their pups).

G and A are off to pick up an eight ball from some dealer downtown. R and I agreed it was best not to know where he lives or his number. Apparently he already left his spot so now they're eternally waiting in a bar for him to show. I have a belief that coke dealers take some deep pleasure out of making us wait--thrilled with the power they hold in their pockets.

G just texted me now that they're "getting things" and then leaving.

I'm slightly nervous. Last time R and I did coke it was from a dealer G knows down in Houston--it was too pure for my own good. I felt the world spin out around me, my stomach lurched into my throat, and nauseous spun to my head.

I was too fucked--how I imagine smoking crack would feel... aka unpleasant.

R won't do coke anymore. He's been having full on body tremors and muscle spasms, which we haven't found the cause of yet. He's stopped drinking too. I'm really proud of how much he's taking care of himself. He worries the coke will only cause them to get worse.

Plexiglass Partitions

I wanted to spontaneously combust at work earlier, standing behind the cash register, time ticking too slow out there and too fast in the system, stress crushed me under it's heel and was proceeding to rub me out. Every customer was slowing me down more than the last, and I was cutting them off mid sentence as they spelled out their first names--"3 letters is all I need" felt like my mantra, all I need to find you in my system, all I need to sell you the pills and get the fuck out of here.

Everyone always wants to tell me their life story. I was more than not in the mood. It seems like anyone outside the plexiglass partition has all the time in the world, and assumes that I do too. But the company times every activity I do there, from how fast I fill an RX, pick up a phone call, scan your rewards card, have your meds in stock, and how many more Rxs I can get you to fill--even if you don't need them. It boggles my mind that each person who calls in starts the conversation with a huge prologue before ever giving me his name or date of birth; he is always inevitably offended once I ask, as if my interruption had ruined his tale of woe and shitty doctors offices, mazes of insurance, transferring pharmacies, or some combination of all 3. Other people call in immediately on the attack, ready to curse out whoever picks up, until it becomes apparent whichever one of us who picks up has no idea what she is talking about. Usually, our confusion doesn't faze any of them, they enjoy a chance to fuck with someone who has no choice but to listen.

I felt my tears welling up as I sold some impotent 35 year old guy his medication to help him produce more sperm; his eyes looked straight through me, I had forgotten to act less like a human and more like a placid, Hindu cow.

Now I'm safe with a cigarette in hand, leaning back in a chair in front of my apartment, looking down at the courtyard below. My mind is left to crave only oxy and opana, forget food or sleep, all I need are drugs. Like my customers, I'm hooked on each new rx you give me, doc, and all I want are more.

I know I'm only supposed to take 3 oxys a day, I'm doing better at following instructions so that the bottle lasts me the full month this time around. That way I'm not wasting hundreds of dollars on some poor old ladies pills.

I was on the phone with insurance for 3 hours today for 3 different patients. For one of them, I was trying to get his suboxone to go through for free like it did last week when we didn't have any. Once it finally came in, he needed to pay his deductible which he hadn't done yet. Well, fuck, it went round and round, until finally the lady on the other side of the phone told him. I don't want any more calls today, any more people to talk to; once I get off work I become a misanthrope.

The opana is dissolving into a gelatinous blob of oxymorphone, that my stomach slowly eats away at over the next 12 hours. It takes 2 hours before the effects begin to peak, which is too long to wait today--please let it start sooner, and take me anywhere but here.

Without drugs, I'd be another miserable 26 year old punk--working my ass off during the week, going to shows on the weekends, and drinking my anger away. The constant need fills that void and gives me a way to fill my time, lying in wait for the moment euphoria to rush over me. When there are no pills, when withdrawal looms over me, then the void is filled with the hunt for relief and pills and to return to nothingness of opiate's embrace.

Texas is getting hotter by the day, but right now the breeze is perfectly warm. The burning menthol tasted in my mouth almost satiates me while I wait for the high to begin.

It seems like I have all the time in the world to wait now that I'm on the other side of the pharmacy, just like the rest of them.

Until next time...

Love,
Lucy

P.S. comment if you read this... let me know there is someone else out there...

Morphine Withdrawal

Behind the pharmacy walls Im dying.

I am ready to curl up and die there. Unable to stop the pain raging from my head down to my feet. The doctor wouldn't rx me anything until I saw him this week--2 days after my mirphine rx ran out. A week from my when my last oxy rx should have been refilled. The muscles in my legs contract. My eyes burn. I yawn again and again--I would take death over this feeling. I  forgot my wallet and have nothing to eat.

I feel the bile creeping up my throat.

And ther goes my breakfast.

Please god, kill me now.

Lucy

The Land of Scathing Sun

The asphalt steams my scrubs; my arms feel hot and sticky. Rain in Texas is always dangerous weather, trucks barrel down the freeway spraying water, sedans end up swept into puddles, and I'm stuck on wet cement for the 30 minutes I have away from the pharmacy in the back corner of the store.

A homeless guy presses me for a cigarette--3 times no and he won't listen to me, "I have 2 ciga left and I'm on my break." A lie to protect my only respite from the world.

Back behind the pharmacy counter, I wanted to scream at people to fuck off all morning. We can't see them approach the counter on the other side of the partition. Usually, within 20 seconds or less, we'll call "be there in a minute." Some immediately knock on the counter, scream hello, it makes me want to stab them with my spatula as I count out 120 Metformin 500mg. A Stetson floats above the glass, a disembodied hat. Fucking Texas.

Everyone is here for their speed and opiates--ready to get legally high, with their doctors' nods of approval.

I pop my own, sitting in the thick air of the parking lot. Customers stare at me as the awning drops on me, I pretend not to notice either. It doesn't matter if you don't look.

I gulp down a 10/325 Percocet and 30mg XR adderall. My own legal euphoria. I have a legitimate condition, undifferentiated spondylarthritis and hypersomnia, along with a million other conditions I take 12 pills to keep in check. I'm a walking disease, an invalid.

I need to pick up my handicapped placard. The prescription is waiting for me at my rheumatologist's office. I'll probably pick it up after I see my new pain doctor.

I hate pain doctors. They treat us all like junkies--piss tests every time. The glances of disbelief at your first meeting, as is maybe all the MRIs and years of testing are wrong. The new guy sounds good though, maybe he'll be able to help me with the burning pain in my feet and the tearing sensation in the tendons of my ankles--along with the deep, crushing aching in my spine and knees, my hands as well.

My break is done, my cigarette barely finished. I watch the clouds of smoke trail off. I grind it out with my feet so that annoying homeless guy can't smoke it. Maybe that makes me an asshole. I haven't decided yet.

Anyway. Back to life behind the pharmacy,

Love you all,

Lucy

All Wired Up and Nowhere to Go

There's ash all over my keyboard again, and now beneath the keys--no easy way to get that out of the computer. The only reason I'm awake is how violently pissed off I am by the doctor.

He theoretically accused me of being wired up by my doctors--well, more that me taking 0.25mg of xanax (the lowest dose made) for anxiety that I thought might almost mean I needed to go back to the psych ward was a problem. I couldn't get my RX because he is a moron about pharmacy law, which I didn't feel like arguing about--although if I had the chance right now I would.

Pain management doctors are so high and mighty, prosecution, judge, jury, and finally warden of the patient's medication. If he knew the laws in this state, he would know you can't fill an RX less than 2 days before the last day supply runs out (regardless of the date on the script, so if you have a 30 day supply, you can fill a new one in 28 days). He didn't know you can write in your own earliest fill day on the bottom of the RX, but it all has to be hand written. He was talking down to me about all of this, telling me that my pharmacist isn't do it properly and all this bullshit, when really I wanted to spit in his fat face.

Now I'm up at 3:30am smoking and ruminating.

Anxiety is a fucking side effect of Enbrel, my main medication for my undifferentiated spondylarthropathy (or USpA). It has been a miracle worker, but it doesn't do enough and I can't change that it is the last line of defense. I wonder if I shouldn't just lay down and go through withdrawal and wait to die in pain.

Fuck. I shouldn't let people crawl up under my skin, but I'd gladly trade bodies with a healthy person any day.

Earlier I wanted to bang my head against the wall, boiling over with rage and no way of expressing it, but I took a xanax and didn't hurt myself. Maybe it's just a bandage, but it's smaller than the one I'd need to cover the gash on my head.

Until tomorrow, with love,
Lucy